Mobile cellular telephones are becoming increasingly popular with an ever-expanding portion of the population. This means not only that such devices are owned and used by more and more subscribers, but that these users are more apt to carry them everywhere. The mobile telephones of only a few years ago were large and bulky, and often required a relatively large battery pack to be carried with them, or, more typically, they were permanently installed in an automobile where a source of reliable power was usually available. Once advances in technology made these mobile devices not only more affordable but more portable, they became a standard piece of equipment for many people to take almost everywhere they go.
As a result, in many group settings such as office-building lobbies, sporting events, shopping centers, and even large offices, the familiar ring of a cellular telephone prompts a multitude of persons to check their own phone to determine if they are the one receiving the publicly—announced incoming call. One way of addressing this cell-phone ubiquity has been for some manufacturers to provide their mobile products with a distinctive ring tone. Note that in this sense, a “ring tone” often includes many and varied tones, the tones sometimes arranged to play a melody. Of course, the more popular a given brand of telephone, the less unique its ring tone becomes. In response, many mobile phones today come programmed with a plurality of available ring tones and ring-tone modifying options (volume, pitch, speed, etc.). A utility is provided for a subscriber's use in customizing the ring tone within, of course, the limits of available options. A subscriber may even be allowed to compose and store an original ring tone.
Often not satisfied with the options available, many subscribers have resorted to installing their own, electronically prerecorded ring tone, provided the mobile phone permits such an operation. While this may be the subscriber's own composition, more often it will have been written and recorded by another expressly for this purpose; the user simply loads it from a storage media or downloads it through the Internet. Suppliers of these extra ring tones typically make them available to properly—equipped subscribers for a nominal (or in some cases significant) fee. (“Properly-equipped” simply means that the subscriber's mobile station is capable of accepting, storing, and playing the desired ring tone.)
Typically, the ring tone is simply loaded and then selected or deselected for use, except that if a particular storage medium gets full, the user may delete an old ring tone in favor of a newly acquired one. In other words, the total utility of the ring tone that is received by the subscriber is as a replacement for the ring tone or tones that were originally available on the phone as it was manufactured and sold. If transmitted to the user in a somewhat different manner, however, the utility of the new ring tone can be extended to provide promotional and entertainment functions as well. The system and method of the present invention provides just such an advantage, an advantage that is adaptable to other types of media presentations as well.